Microsoft's Bing Likes Facebook Even More

Microsoft is deepening Bing's relationship with Facebook, extending the Liked Results feature that allows you to see which Websites are liked by your Facebook friends.

Microsoft is deepening Bing's relationship with Facebook for
U.S. users, extending the social network's Liked Results to any URLs retrieved
by its algorithmic search.
"If your friends have publicly liked or shared any of the
algorithmic search results shown on Bing, we will now surface them right below
the result," Lawrence Kim, a member of the Bing Social Team, wrote
in a Feb. 24 posting on the Bing Community blog. "You may not see Liked
Results on every query, but when it does trigger it's often a delightful
experience."

As an example, say you decide to research used cars on Bing.
Thanks to this latest Facebook integration, any used-car Websites "Liked" by
your Facebook friends will feature their names and images alongside a "liked
this" notation. In theory, unless your friends' needs and tastes in no way
correlate with yours, this will allow you to narrow down those Websites best
suited for your needs.

Kim also framed the marriage between Bing search and
Facebook's "Like" button in sweeping terms. "This is the first time in human
history that people are leaving social traces that machines can read and learn
from, and present enhanced online experiences based on those traces," he wrote.
"As people spend more time online and integrate their offline and online
worlds, they will want their friends' social activity and their social data to
help them in making better decisions."
Microsoft and Facebook originally announced their
social-search partnership in October 2010,
when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared onstage with Microsoft executives to
talk about how social tools could enhance more generalized Web search.
"We're hard-wired so that information about people is the
most interesting information we track in the world," he told the audience.

For its part, Microsoft likely hopes that a fresh layer of
Facebook data will allow Bing to compete even more robustly with Google, which
itself is increasingly antagonistic toward Facebook's designs on the larger
Web. In addition to Liked Results, the partnership has also delivered Facebook
Profile Search, which leverages a user's Facebook connections to deliver more
relevant results for people.
"These with whom you have mutual friends will now show up
first," read an Oct. 13 note on The
Facebook Blog. "Bing is also making more prominent the ability to add these
people as friends on Facebook directly from Bing."
Microsoft is an investor in Facebook, having paid $240
million for a 1.6 percent stake.

Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.